I spent most of last week at the Javapolis conference in Antwerp Belgium. With nearly 3000 attendees, it's the second biggest Java conference after JavaOne, and it's held in a movie cineplex complex called "Metropolis". The venue delivers large halls, comfortable seats (with beverage caddies!), and dramatic lighting. Half of each enormous movie screen is devoted to a live image of the presenter and the camerawork is quite good, pausing for a dramatic closeup now and then. My laptop wasn't working correctly so I had to turn around periodically, to visually sync up with my slides. That meant that the audience was treated to six linear feet of my balding hemisphere glowing in the klieg lights. I was thankful that everyone put up with that, and also with my raspy voice. I'd managed to pick up a cold the day before leaving, and only hours before I was scheduled to speak, I could do little more than croak and wheeze. Things were somewhat better by the showtime, however from the sound of my voice you might think I'd spent the day smoking heavily and shrieking.

My presentation topic was JSR-296 "Swing Application Framework". If you're interested, there's a copy here. Within a few months you'll find a nicely edited slides-and-video version of the presentation on parleys.com, thanks to Stephan Janssen, the tireless Javapolis organizer. And when it appears, do not miss the finale. As Richard Bair and I finished up a demo of a prototype of the Application Framework in NetBeans, Stephan appeared and asked to interrupt the proceedings for a special announcment. He picked up the microphone and asked a woman who's name I didn't catch to come forward. Sure enough, a tall young blonde woman came to the front, looking nonplussed. After a brief pause, a young man wearing a suit came loping down the aisle and in a moment he was facing the woman and making a declaration of some kind in Dutch. She looked pretty nervous and, not knowing where this was all going, we started feeling a bit anxious too. Until he dropped to one knee and assumed the international marriage proposal position. Then we really started to worry, because here was a situation that could only end really well, or really badly. The woman was crying (uh oh) and smiling (whew!), and then nodding her head, and to everyone's relief, we had a happy betrothal. The couple bounded up the steps to a nice round of applause, and Richard and I tried to remember what it was we'd been talking about.

The Javapolis conference was memorable as always. One evening the organizers arranged for enough french fries and mayonaise to serve 3000 (that's a lot), they showed the new James Bond movie, Mark Fleury performed his keynote dressed up like Flavor Flav, Sun raffled away a Nintendo Wii, the technical sessions were solid, and, mine was interrupted by a proposal of marriage. With a happy ending.

Merry Christmas!

Update: Stephan Janssen has published the video, you'll find it here:
http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP06/2006/12/22/JavaPolis+2006+Marriage+Proposal

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